by Laurie Hanna, Daily Mirror 22/02/2011
And now children in dirt-poor Haiti are being sold to callous human traffickers for less than a quid, it was revealed yesterday.
Some infants in the Caribbean country – still in chaos following last year’s horror quake – are being forced into prostitution.
Others are being adopted by families in Europe who are unaware of their traumatic backgrounds.
Penniless parents, believing their young will lead better lives elsewhere, are handing them to crooks posing as concerned officials.
Melissa Nau, 38, who suffers from learning and physical disabilities, sold four of her five children for 50 Haitian gourdes (76p) each.
Unable to work to provide for them, she was living in a filthy, ramshackle camp in the quake-shattered capital Port-au-Prince when a man she knew only as Jacques offered to buy the youngsters, aged between four and eight.
But the money only lasted a few months and she is broke again.
Melissa and her remaining son Roland, who is 10 months old, later came to the attention of staff from the United Nations Children’s Fund and have been placed in a safe house.
The death toll from the magnitude- 7.0 quake in January last year, Haiti’s worst for more than two centuries, has been estimated at more than 300,000, while about a million have lost their homes.
And new figures from Unicef show 76% of the population now live on less than £1.50 a day.
Unicef is working with Brigade de Protection des Mineurs, a police department investigating child abuse, to monitor the refugee camps and borders in an effort to pinpoint vulnerable children.
The BPM discovered that Melissa’s children were given false records and then illegally adopted by European families via an international adoption agency.
A Unicef spokeswoman said: “Well- meaning parents in the US and Europe have no idea that children have been kid-napped or stolen and bought from the displacement camps of Port-au-Prince.”
Françoise Moise, a BPM officer, said trafficking had always been an issue in Haiti but had grown steadily worse in the last year.
Mr Moise said some of the sprawling camps – where the million homeless live in tents – contained more than 80,000 families, making them difficult to monitor.
He added: “People are coming into the camps posing as government officials, or foreigners that have come to help Haiti.
“They also pose as Haitians living abroad coming to help survivors and sometimes even as Haitians living here, pretending to be members of their family.”
Since Unicef started funding the BPM last April, 8,000 children have been identified as “extremely vulnerable” within the camps.
The BPM has also screened 7,000 children passing through the border into the Dominican Republic and 1,400 of those were found not to have the right paperwork.
Thirty-five people have been arrested on suspicion of offences relating to kidnapping but there is no law against trafficking in Haiti.
Dieudonne Barnave, a BPM official, said: “The most difficult thing for us is when they have false documents for the children to cross the border because we don’t have the means of verifying whether these documents are fake or real.”
The BPM discovered that Melissa’s children were given false records and then illegally adopted by European families via an international adoption agency.
A Unicef spokeswoman said: “Well- meaning parents in the US and Europe have no idea that children have been kid-napped or stolen and bought from the displacement camps of Port-au-Prince.”
Françoise Moise, a BPM officer, said trafficking had always been an issue in Haiti but had grown steadily worse in the last year.
Mr Moise said some of the sprawling camps – where the million homeless live in tents – contained more than 80,000 families, making them difficult to monitor.
He added: “People are coming into the camps posing as government officials, or foreigners that have come to help Haiti.
“They also pose as Haitians living abroad coming to help survivors and sometimes even as Haitians living here, pretending to be members of their family.”
Since Unicef started funding the BPM last April, 8,000 children have been identified as “extremely vulnerable” within the camps.
The BPM has also screened 7,000 children passing through the border into the Dominican Republic and 1,400 of those were found not to have the right paperwork.
Thirty-five people have been arrested on suspicion of offences relating to kidnapping but there is no law against trafficking in Haiti.
Dieudonne Barnave, a BPM official, said: “The most difficult thing for us is when they have false documents for the children to cross the border because we don’t have the means of verifying whether these documents are fake or real.”
